Chapter 1 Hard at Work, Naked in the Hot Sun

Two years and nine months had passed since three young ex-public school girls had successfully completed a bizarre and frequently chilly initiation test. This test had taken them on a journey across their native land, bringing them face to face with all manner of remarkable and frequently frightening people.

It was August now and very hot in Africa, especially for the work-hardened fair-skinned girl toiling naked under the burning sun.

Harriet paused for a second in her attack on the piece of rock, in order to wipe the sweat away. It was getting into her eyes and she had no choice but to risk a punishment for slacking. Happily for her, the guards had their attention elsewhere - they knew by this time that she was a hard and tireless worker and this pair had recently ceased to bother her much - so she resumed her powerful, remorseless and skilful demolition of the rock, her strong, scarred, gleaming back and sweating, well-muscled buttocks, for a mercy unmolested.

She poised her impressively strong body, flexed her powerful biceps and shoulder muscles, and coming up onto the toes of her hardened bare feet, prepared to wield those final few well-aimed, powerful blows of the pickaxe which would finally reduce the rock to fragments - a feat she had performed so many times recently, that she found herself dreaming about it at nights.

She had wanted the body of a female Goliath, and this had been granted to her in full measure - although not lately in the way she would have liked. She could bear comparison to any man in the workforce - some of them were magnificent specimens - and even in her present awful predicament she gloried in her strong and muscular body and her amazing stamina. She recalled how many times before her capture she had had to buy new clothes to fit her increasingly muscular body. No worries on that score since she had been kidnapped and forced to walk naked carrying all manner of heavy equipment through the forests and savannahs, finally ending up in this lair helping to build the base for the final battle.

Another obstacle in the path of the runway construction project had been cleared and she shovelled up the fragments and wheeled them away to be used as spoil later. There were plenty more rocks to remove and plenty more irregularities to be evened out and depressions to be filled in and plenty more pushing of the heavy roller and laying of concrete before the long runway would be ready. And what then? They would hardly need her services when automatic rollers and mechanised excavating machinery had been flown in. The other labourers were all volunteers, albeit rather reluctant ones, and they would in all probability go back to their villages, but the despised white prisoner would very likely be surplus to requirements - a useless mouth to feed. She wondered how long it would be before this base had been turned into some sort of springboard for a final assault on the capital and the likely death of all those good friends in high government positions that she she had made in those productive and happy months before her capture.

For the hundredth time in the course of this long day she reflected that this was the second anniversary of her arrival in Africa and to this strife-torn country. It was also the end of a year as the prisoner of the Marxist rebels who had so much of the land in their merciless grip. She had little hope of rescue - all her friends thought she was dead - and none of escape. All her efforts to get away had been miserable failures and she had no wish to suffer further uncomfortable retribution. Indeed she had been told that just one more attempt to leave would be her last act in this world and she had a shrewd idea that her exit from life would not be made easy.

"To think I once had some sympathy for these horrible people" she mutterd under her breath as she remembered the juvenile Communist sympathies which she had once inflicted on friend and family alike. It pained and shamed her to think that her good work in her first year for a VSO project had been utterly negated by the contribution she was being forced into now in her second twelvemonth, helping these evil butchers to enslave and destroy a country and people she had come to love, if not admire. She ought to refuse to do any more for them and damn the consequences - she knew one brave friend who would long ago have done just that - and now that all hope of escape or rescue seemed gone, she resolved either to make one more escape attempt or simply refuse to do any more work for these monsters.

"One more day of this, and if nothing shows up (which it won't) I'll bring it to an end one way or another. Who wants to go on living anyway if this is all life has to offer?" Such was her desparing thought.

One of the other workers came up to her with a cup of water which she eagerly gulped down. It was her first drink for four hours - they had denied her the last two-hourly drink, allegedly for not working hard enough - as if! She did more than any two of these other useless people put together.

She was European and hated by her fanatic captors - a subhuman member of a former colonial ruling caste fit only to be used as a beast of burden and regularly beaten and flogged as a way of making her work even harder. At least she had no fear of being raped, as any contact with her was deemed to be defiling to these glorious fighters for freedom. Not that she didn't frequently get plenty of lusting glances from her captors. But discipline was so vicious and so cruelly enforced, that nobody dared touch her except to slap her around from time to time - and that she could easily handle. If discipline ever did break down, she dreaded to think what might happen to her at the hands of some of these men - although it would take three of them at least to overpower her, if they ever did decide on anything.